Flem274*
123/5
Talent: Natural endowment or ability of a superior quality.
Skill: Proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience.
Ability: The quality of being able to do something, especially the physical, mental, financial, or legal power to accomplish something.
Skill: Proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience.
Ability: The quality of being able to do something, especially the physical, mental, financial, or legal power to accomplish something.
Recently I have wondered what talent is, specifically what makes one cricketer more talented than another.
When I talk to fans, or read the forums, or listen to commentators and experts, the word is thrown around more often than Benchy’s missus. The word appears everywhere, from discussion over batting technique to how fast one bowls.
And that is my problem: when Tim Southee is described as talented, the speaker means to say he is a tall man who can bowl accurate outswing at brisk pace. When they use it to describe Brendon McCullum, they mean he bats at a frenetic pace with lots of boundaries.
The problem is everything described above barring height are skills which can be learned. Anyone can bowl an outswinger if they choose to learn, and accuracy can be honed by bowling and bowling and bowling. Pace can be gained.
I would like to hammer down a proper definition of talent.
Now I know what you’re all thinking when it comes to what makes a talented batsman (more on bowlers later): hand eye coordination. I agree, hand eye coordination is something you are already born with that cannot be learned, only honed. They can actually test how good it is these days as well; there is an interview with Chris Martin where he mentions his eyes compared to Brendon McCullum’s were terrible, and this was measured. McCullum’s eyes can handle more information, see this information earlier, and process this information faster than Chris Martin ever will. Chris Martin will never be a good batsman.
But we also know reliance on pure hand eye coordination does not cut it once the player reaches a certain level. Shahid Afridi is the perfect example, Peter Ingram another. Once these men reach the top level, they are playing alongside players who are their equals in hand eye coordination and they are asked to score runs against bowlers who have the requisite skills to exploit their flaws. They have reached the top end of the Bell Curve in cricket, and very little separates the hand eye coordination of Shahid Afridi from Ricky Ponting. Ponting may have better hand eye coordination for all I know. If both have taken the same test as Chris Martin, to my knowledge the results have never been released.
Which brings me to two conclusions:
i) The only relevance hand eye coordination has to your success at international level is enabling you to see the ball. You aren’t a God amongst men here, and you need more than your eyes to succeed.
ii) People who call one player more talented than another, assuming they are referring to hand eye coordination, are making it up unless they have the reaction time test results to prove it.
The problem with point ii is a lot of the time, people factor in more than hand eye coordination as talent. Once I had a discussion with a fellow kiwi member who thought technique was a talent. Technique is not talent; it is a skill because you learn it. Show me a five year old picking up a cricket bat for the first time and displaying perfect forward defense, and I will be all ears. Kane Williamson doesn’t have a superb technique through his own natural ability, he has a superb technique because his father taught him. I can construct the perfect MCC technique, but it won’t do me any good because my hand eye coordination is too poor to play test cricket. Attractive strokes and strike rate are also used as an indicator of talent, and television commentators appear to be especially bad at this. I can hit a lovely cover drive if I do say so myself, but that is due to my technique being the perceived “pretty” way to bat. I am still a hack. Likewise, Athlai tells me he loves to have a swing; that doesn’t make him any less of a Wellingtonian bastard. It’s just the way he plays. It’s even worse than describing a superior technique as a talent because having a pretty cover drive isn’t even a skill; it’s a coincidence of subjective taste.
A better case can be made for the psychological qualities as talent, because people are born with temperaments well suited to elite sport. However, psychological factors can also be learnt. Ian Bell and James Anderson went from flakes to hardened professionals, and I’m fairly sure they didn’t spend another nine months in the womb to gain their newfound mental strength. Psychiatrists exist to train people to think in certain ways so they can improve their mental health. Sports psychologists are paid to turn players into success cases like Ian Bell and James Anderson.
One possibility is all these skills added together plus the required hand eye coordination make a batsman talented, but I’m going to have to disagree on that one as well. A skill mixed with blessed hand eye coordination does not make you a more talented batsman. Your hand eye coordination is given more of a chance to do its work when you have a better technique, but it does not increase it.
Batsman A, let us call him Jack Kallisball, is a batsman with outstanding hand eye coordination, good temperament and a good technique. He reaches the international stage and scores thousands of runs at an excellent average. Batsman B, let us call him Shehad Aflounce-di, is a batsman who is impulsive, impatient and relies on his hand eye coordination. He reaches the international stage. He is a flop.
Batsman A doesn’t necessarily have more talent than Batsman B, though it depends on which tenuous definition you choose to use.
What Batsman A has is superior ability.
Ability: The quality of being able to do something, especially the physical, mental, financial, or legal power to accomplish something.
When we talk about batsmen, we use the T word wrongly. It is a lazy word, fast becoming a cliché, and we use it as a quick justification for our point of view because we cannot be bothered thinking very hard about what we are saying. A fast scorer is not more talented than a slow scorer, a batsman with good technique is not more talented than a batsman with a poor technique, and a slogger is a slogger is a slogger. When we use the word talent, our subjective bias shines through. Even if the definition of talent is applied to the correct attributes, calling X more talented than Y is still unjustifiable until reaction test results are presented. Of course some are obvious, such as Chris Martin, but top order batsmen at the international level will all be in the same ballpark. Being beaten by pace is one way, but a test batsman may be beaten by pace for reasons other than hand eye coordination. Tim McIntosh didn’t get bowled by the Amir yorker because he didn’t see it; he picked the line and he picked the length; he got bowled because his footwork was atrocious. If a test batsman is getting beaten by pace, his career will be short. I would be surprised if he could even nail down a spot in a domestic competition where brisk pace is common, such as South Africa and Australia.
I will go as far as saying that provided a batsman has the hand eye coordination to see the ball at test level, his hand eye coordination is irrelevant. Every international batsman has fantastic hand eye coordination, but what separates the best from the rest is skill. If you’re an international batsman, saying Ricky Ponting is a better batsman than you because he has more talent is a cop out. Ponting is a better batsman because he has more ability than you, and you have the power to change that.
Moving on to bowlers (and this will be short since my view on bowling talent is still a work in progress), most of the time when I hear someone say Bowler X is better than Bowler Y, they mean to say Bowler X has more ability than Bowler Y because he bowls faster and gets more swing. Pace can be gained: Ryan Harris did it, Iain O’Brien gained 5kph in his last series, Shane Bond began his career as medium pace. “You can’t teach pace” has been proven to be incorrect time and time again. Likewise, you can learn to bowl an outswinger, and how much it swings depends on your execution of the delivery and how cloudy it is.
Height is one easy natural attribute to place on a bowler, and when a tall man uses his height he gains a significant advantage. However, Malcolm Marshall and Waqar Younis were hardly tall men, and they are two of the very finest fast bowlers the game has produced. Height is useful if you have it, but it doesn’t impede a short bowler at all.
Ironically, accuracy is the only other thing I can think of that could be down to talent. You hear all kinds of stories about bowlers hitting coins in the nets. No matter how much I practice, I can’t bowl as accurately as other people I know, and I could certainly never hit a coin twice in a row (or even once). While accuracy is certainly improved with practice, us mere mortals seem to hit a ceiling. I find this especially amusing since when an accurate medium pacer makes his test debut, he is a hard working trier who makes the most of his limited talent, especially if he is from New Zealand or England. Then the prodigiously talented Mitchell Johnson comes on to bowl and the commentators go gaga as he sprays it all over the place.
But once again, apart from attributes like accuracy and height, there are lots of bowling attributes labelled as talents that are actually skills. Provided you have the requisite accuracy for test level, you can be anything if you hone the other skills in your armoury or add some new ones to it.
So my position is thus: we wrongly label skills or a player’s ability as talent, and the only relevance talent has to how good a player can be is to provide him with the requisite natural attributes to make it to test or first class level. Once the player reaches a certain level, they need more than what they were born with or they will fail. Talent is a lazy, filthy word that needs to be purged from cricketing terminology.
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